My Vacation with Mike

According to my parents, there’s quite a lot of story missing with just the photos I’ve shared on Facebook. I hope this fills in some of the gaps!

The first adventure Mike and I had was a tour of Hlane. All the big game in Swaziland is held in game parks, so there are no wild lions. Hlane has 4 of the Big 5 (no Cape Buffalo, sorry), and is located in the lowveld near a town called Simunye. It’s one of the oldest game parks in Swaziland.

There are three areas within Hlane: the lion part, the elephant part, and the middle part with no game. We took a sunrise and a sunset game drive, and we were able to see almost all of the animals they have in the park. Lions, white rhinos, hippos, nyala, impala, blue wildebeest (which was part of our dinner), warthogs, elephants, giraffes, whitebacked vultures, and many other animals were out roaming around. The nyala were roaming around near our hut, and an African python was hanging out right next to the restaurant. Good thing no one stepped on that!

Python

Giraffe

Lions on the road

Elephants in the road

Nyala

You’ll notice in some of the photos that there are skeleton trees. This is because the elephants will scrape the bark off acacia trees to eat it, and the trees eventually die. After their death, the elephants will push them over. Elephants convert bushveld to grassland over time. The conservation officers at Hlane do not remove the dead trees, but leave them for the elephants to push over in time. The focus of the park is conservation, so very little is altered beyond what the animals do.

Giraffes among the skeleton trees

Hlane does not have electricity. Our roundavel where we stayed was fully equipped with lanterns and a gas-powered hot shower. If it hadn’t been storming, we would have fallen asleep to the sounds of lions roaring. It really was a beautiful park, and the absolute darkness was something to see.

Following Hlane, we hit the road to Durban, which is a city in South Africa. Although the Peace Corps Volunteers mainly enjoyed Durban for the chance to eat all the food we can’t get in Swaziland, Mike remarked that it was just another large city. He was right, although there were some touristy things to do. We visited The Old Fort, the Botanical Gardens, uShaka Marine World, and the beaches on the Indian Ocean.

After Durban, we went off the grid for a bit. We drove to Drakensberg, which is an area of mountains on the border between South Africa and Lesotho. We stayed at Sani Lodge, which is a backpackers located on its own farm. Breakfast featured homemade yogurt, jams, and bread that were absolutely delicious, and they sold some really delicious cheese. It was quite cold in the area due to the elevation, and there wasn’t really phone service.

The first day in Drakensberg, we took a 4x4 tour up the Sani Pass, which is at an elevation of 2873m. It’s located in Lesotho, so we had to cross a very interesting border. The South African side is at the bottom of the mountain, but the Lesotho side is quite a bit farther on, at the top. Khumbis (public transport, 16-seater vans) have their own system for this border crossing. One with 4 wheel drive brings people up and down the mountain, and one without it waits and takes over on the flatter ground.

Most of the road to Sani Pass is a well maintained dirt road that isn’t too steep. Close to the pass, however, it does a ridiculous zig-zag with 14 curves to get up the last steep stretch. In the winter, ice can make this road either impassable or deadly. The road flattened out at the top, and we rode into Lesotho. 

The road ahead is crazy!

The mountains

The view

Although I don’t know the elevation, we kept going up. We went up as high as we could and ate our sack lunches in freezing cold wind at the top of a mountain. The view was incredible, and some local shepherds provided us with company and entertainment. After lunch, we went on a little cultural tour of a village.

Lesotho and Swaziland are both small countries that are heavily influenced by South Africa, but their cultures are vastly different. The Basotho people speak a language similar to Setswana (spoken in Botswana) while the Swazi people speak siSwati, which is very similar to isiZulu (a language in South Africa). Basotho people build their houses with the intention of keeping warm through harsh winters and mild summers, while Swazis build theirs with the goal of keeping cool through scorching summers and mild winters. Basotho people cannot do much other than keep sheep and goats due to the elevation and rocky soil in the area we visited, while the fertile soil of Swaziland makes fruits and vegetables readily available. Seeing these differences was incredibly interesting.

There were also similarities, such as children waving down the car to ask for sweets, men asking you to take their photo and then wanting money for it, and a sense of hospitality and friendliness. A woman welcomed us into her home and shared some bread she had baked in a Dutch oven and some beer (umcombotsi) that she had fermented from sorghum grain. She was shy, but very kind and willing to answer our questions. If I had been alone and caught in a storm in either of these two small countries, I know I would have been welcomed in with strangers and taken care of. The kindness and compassion in this region, and perhaps in all of rural Africa, never fails to make an impact on me.

The view from the top of a mountain in Lesotho

The inside of a hut in Lesotho. The walls and floor are pressed cow dung and mud, and the roof is low and thatch to keep the hut warm.

The pub

Following our visit to the homestead, we visited the Sani Mountain Lodge, the highest pub in Africa (2874m). We tried one of their specialties, a mulled red wine called Gluvine. The warmth of that coupled with the cold breeze and the incredible view made that a great end to a very cool day.

The view from the pub

Gluvine, the delicious mulled wine we had at the pub

Our second day, we hiked 14K to see the paintings of the bushmen. Evidently, the bridge we had to cross had been damaged in a recent storm. Because none of us wanted to add 5K more to the hike, we crossed it anyway. Everyone was fine. We then hiked for about 3K and went up a 300m increase in elevation. The 5 very fit Germans and Mike were doing just fine, while the 4 PCVs brought up the rear (and I brought up the very end). Most of us can walk (and frequently do walk – I walk 10K every day I go to school) for hours on flat ground, but have no endurance for this level of steepness. Regardless of that little challenge, we all got up, and then had a long hike along fairly level ground.

Our trail was right along the cloud line

 The paintings that are best preserved are located in areas where people don’t go, which is why we needed this long hike. We saw some paintings that featured only one color, and therefore could have been ancient, and some that featured more than 2 or 3, and were definitely more recent. Since none of the paintings have been dated, we can only guess at their age while we wait for the archaeologists to get out there and take a look.

The paintings don’t tell a story. The bushmen believed that the spirits of their ancestors lived in the eland (think cow-sized gazelle), so the paintings were done in their blood as a way of connecting with the ancestors. Before the paintings could be started, however, there was a ritual to observe. The bushmen had to dance to enter a trance state, which was very painful. They wouldn’t eat or drink and could dance for days, and usually experienced nosebleeds (according to our guide). They could only paint when then had entered the trance, and the paintings were their way of communicating with their ancestors. If they painted many men around dead eland, then they were praying for a successful hunt. Sometimes, although not common, they painted women, but women were never allowed to paint.

It was an interesting feeling to look at something that had the potential of being thousands of years old, was painted by an now-extinct group of people, and that we will never fully understand. It made me aware of how insignificant each life is in the overall timeline of human history, but how much each life matters in the years it has on Earth (and even the years following).

After we saw the paintings, our guide gave us two choices: go back down the way we came up, or go down a different way to see a waterfall. We’d have to ford two springs and it would be straight down the mountain, he informed us. I think not many of us fully grasped what “straight down” meant, and we chose that path.

It was straight down. I had my hands as well as my feet on the rocks and grass most of the 300m down, and frequently had to scoot or slide when it was too steep to do anything else. By the time I got down, I was shaking and exhausted, but thrilled. We then saw the “stream” we would be expected to cross. It was up to my thighs and fast moving. I couldn’t stand in the current without getting swept away, so our very kind guide held my hand (and only made fun of me a little bit). By the time we were 1K from the waterfall, we were exhausted. I was expecting to see a little mountain waterfall, and I just wanted to rest, but we pushed on.

The waterfall was huge and absolutely beautiful. It was worth the walk and worth the wait. Ultimately, everything we saw in Drakensberg was incredible, and it was my favorite part of the trip.
 

Crossing the river

The waterfall

After that, we drove back to Swaziland, where I took Mike to the Cultural Village. That was pretty much a trap to get gullible tourists to believe things with are no longer relevant to modern Swazi culture, but it was a great history lesson. Mike also visited my homestead, where he made fast friends with my cow, Cheese Boy.

My parents asked me to explain a photo, saying that there were things in there that Americans wouldn’t understand. If you look in the background of Mike feeding Cheese Boy, you’ll see that there is a big metal thing. At one point, this was a water tank, but due to its age and plethora of leaks, it is now defunct. The animals all hide in it when it rains, so it does serve some purpose, even if it isn’t the intended purpose.

The homestead

The baskets are where the chickens roost. Normally there’s a little stick ladder that the chickens use to hop up there, but that ladder breaks all the time (and you know when it does by the sudden auditory onslaught of angry clucking that follows the fall of a surprised chicken). Since we have roosters, we don’t eat the eggs, but right now we have a whole bunch of little chicks.

That about sums up the trip. If anyone has any questions, I’d be happy to answer them!